How to tell fake images from real ones using Photoshop
Have you ever seen a photo on the internet that was just too good to be true? Well here is a tip from my Photoshop bag of tricks that shows you how to investigate them further.
What you will need
- Copy of Photoshop
- Any photo you like (You can use the ones below if you like)
Below I have two images a before and after of the same image. I removed the clock tower in one of them using Photoshop’s Stamp and various other tools. What I am going to show you is how to tell where someone has retouched a photo. So first things first fire up Photoshop and open your questionable image.
Before Photoshop
After Photoshop
Ok press CTRL+U or go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation and set the Hue to a low setting, the Saturation to a higher setting, and mess with the light and look for blotches of color that don’t follow the rest of the image. If the photo has in fact been manipulated it will show blotches around the area that was photoshoped. That’s it, below is the image with the Hue/Saturation adjustment applied to it as you can see where the clock tower is there are blotches of color indicating an edit job. This works on any photograph not just photoshoped ones. You can scan in any image you would like to check its integrity.
Tuesday, January 9 January 9, 2007
from the photograph it looks like the sky was photoshopped too so this isn’t the most reliable technique.
Wednesday, January 10 January 10, 2007
This is a *great* tip–but readers should bear in mind that this is NOT a fail-safe way to show if an image has been Photoshopped–just a way to tell under certain circustances.
In this instance, there is a obvious pattern of posterization based pixel manipulation by PS tools. A high-end retoucher, however, would not necessarily use the tools in question–for instance, I rarely touch the cloner healing tool or patch stamp–because the results aren’t fine enough for the quality of retouching I want in my finished product. In a case like this, I would simply copy sections of the sky from adjoining areas, and then clean up the edges at 500% magnification, using various manual tools–dodging and burning on an overlay layer filled with neutral gray, for instance. Even my first copy, however, with a feathered edge of 1 pixel resulted in no sky issues whatsoever, under the hue/saturation test. And that was a mere 15 seconds worth of work.
In addition, with an image like this, where it would be unlikely that I would want an overexposed sky, I would probably drop in my own sky–completely removing the need for any multiple step copying and pasting. If I took the sky from a separate shoot–then there would likely be differences in the amount of noise showing up under hue/saturation…(as would also be the case if I chose to, say, drop a person in on a digital background)–but if I were smart–I would have taken pictures of the properly exposed sky, during the same shoot–and then my sky would have almost identical noise patterns to the rest of the image…which would mean that the only “clue” to my retouching would be subtle things, like reflected light/color, or possibly sloppy borders between background and foreground. In fact, nowadays when I’m doing a shoot, and know ahead of time that there are elements that I’ll be PS’ing out–I’ll take additional shots of elements to replace or cover the “bad” stuff at the same time–so that I can save time in getting an accurate match later on.
All of which is VERY probably more work/skill than the average “fake you out” internet image would have going in to it–and your test would undoubtedly catch quite a lot of fakes–I just wanted the non-Photoshopp-y folks out there to know that this is a *good* test–but not one that will catch EVERY fake image out there! :-) You undoubtedly know this already…but the average person wouldn’t. :-)
Wednesday, January 10 January 10, 2007
I think that you know what you did that’s why you easily cant point it out. I am sure that I have right say about it. I will try later, Well if it is really working then this is marvelous. I will inform my friend to edit some picture and will try to find the photoshop work.
Tuesday, March 13 March 13, 2007
I dont think this is a reliable or smart trick to guess whether an image is photoshopped or not. Maybe it works in some cases.
Thursday, April 5 April 5, 2007
Who cares if a photo has been photoshopped
Friday, February 8 February 8, 2008
I think its not a great idea to tell it is fake since it is hard for the highly feathered image to point out exactly.
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